Social Justice Education With and for Pre-Service Teachers in the Borderlands

Introduction

Sleeter and Stillman (2005) point out the lack of homogeneity that characterizes student populations in the United States. Diversity across race, class, gender, religion, and age, will likely continue to increase and will be reflected in our classrooms (Sleeter & Flores Carmona, 2017; Valenzuela, 2016). With such a diverse student population, educating students and designing and/or implementing inclusive curricula has become a troubling discussion (Pinar, 2012). There is also a moral and ethical endeavor to guide the students, so they gain knowledge and skills relevant and pertinent to their future endeavors. In order to meet this moral and ethical obligation, educators must ensure that their praxis is conducive and reflective of their students’ needs and social realities. It needs to be culturally responsive.

Most crucial yet, it is imperative that pre-service teachers leave their programs with the ability to adapt to the needs and realities of the ever-changing student demographics (Sleeter & Stillman, 2005; Valenzuela, 2016). A culturally responsive curriculum is key when discussing social justice education. Unfortunately, as Aronson (2018) asserts, teacher preparation programs struggle to put into practice a social justice education model to help future instructors learn how to connect its theory and praxis merged with pedagogy. Consequently, Clausen (2017) points out the need to strengthen the body of literature regarding multiple ways to infuse social justice education into teacher preparation programs.

Our purpose in this study was to share our experiences and new insights gained when we implemented a social justice approach in a co-taught course for pre-service undergraduate students. We bring attention to the importance of incorporating social justice approaches in teacher education programs in ways that are responsive to some of the realities facing public education. Hence, in this chapter, we share also Efren’s experience teaching in the middle school context. Herein, we provide details about the two contexts, the student-learners, the undergraduate course content, and the two of us and our connection to social justice education. Then we delve into the theoretical frameworks serving as the foundations for the analysis of our experiences and our reflections about our co-teaching experience. This is followed by Efren’s experience in his own middle school classroom. Through this self-study, we intend to share how our praxis worked to show pre-service teachers that it is possible to un-standardize the curriculum (Sleeter & Flores Carmona, 2017) and to enact what Villenas (2019) terms “pedagogy of being with.”

Background And Methods

The Setting: Specifically, our co-teaching experience took place in a required Multicultural Education course for pre-service teachers at a university located in the Southwest U.S.-Mexico borderlands region. According to Elenes and Delgado Bernal (2009), this region, “is perhaps the only one in the world where a first and third world country converge” (p. 74). The university is a land grant, Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). HSIs are defined as having gained their designation by enrolling at least 25% of their “full-time equivalent undergraduate population” (Griffin & Hurtado, 2011, p. 37) from the Latinx/a/o communities. HSI’s receive federal funding based on this designation and they must also have at least “50 percent low-income students” (Griffin & Hurtado, 2011, p. 37).

The other setting that gave context to this study is a middle school located in Phoenix, Arizona. The school district that housed that school had a predominantly Hispanic student population, 87%; reflecting a reality of the population of Phoenix. Phoenix has a high percentage of Hispanics and Latinos: 42.6% as of 2019 (United States Census Bureau, n.d.). Also, the majority of the parents at this school district have a low educational attainment; 58% of them hold less than a high school diploma, and 49.2% of the children come from families with income below the poverty level as of 2017 (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.).